Q: I got Amazon Echo for Christmas. It tells me the weather and plays music. What else can it do? It seems like a waste of money to me. A: At its core, Amazon's Echo is a Bluetooth speaker that responds to voice commands.

In February, I took a job designing the personality of a chatbot called Kai. I ghostwrite the lines it says, and I have thought, while testing it, that talking to myself has rarely been so unpredictable. Kai, which was conceived by my employer, Kasisto, to help customers with online banking, works over text message, Slack, and especially Facebook Messenger, where more than thirty-four thousand other chatbots have joined it since April, when Facebook opened the platform to developers. Many of these bots possess no personality. The ones created by CNN and the Wall Street Journal, for instance, greet first-time users with "we," as if the whole newsroom were on the other side of the screen, and run keyword searches rather than engaging in conversation.

If you prefer reading, here's the quick recap on what changes AI will bring to marketers according to these four industry influencers, plus some of my personal suggestions of what you should do in face of these changes: According to Sam Mallikarjunan, Head of Growth of HubSpot Labs, visual content will have an increasing influence on SEO, as he says, "search engines are getting good at knowing what a video, audio clip, or image is actually about." Not only does Google favor YouTube videos in search results, they're also getting better at analyzing what visual content is about. Just like how content writers had to learn to optimize headings and keywords, visual artists will have to start thinking about SEO when creating visual content like images and videos. SEO for videos, for example, means optimizing keyword targeting, descriptions, tags, video length, and more. Here's a great guide on optimizing videos for SEO from Brian Dean, if you want to learn more.

In celebration of our 5th anniversary, this month we're publishing a series of interviews with innovative leaders about what the next five years hold. To read more about this series, read our editor Nilay Patel's introduction here. Aaron Levie spends more time thinking about the future of work than most. When the 30-year-old entrepreneur co-founded Box, it was as a place for average people to store their files online -- Dropbox before there was Dropbox. But years ahead of Dropbox CEO Drew Houston, Levie saw that the real money in online storage was in the workplace -- and so the company turned to making products that let people collaborate at work.

It's the last day of 2016 and many of us are already planning a better 2017. And we are not alone on that. Many tech companies have plans to bring many and exciting technology trends. Some of them have already made an impact on 2016 and the new year might bring more features. Let's check the most noticeable technology trends for 2017.

Today's tech buzzword, Artificial Intelligence (AI), can be a difficult concept for many people to wrap their heads around. AI technology, which arguably holds vast potential to revolutionize the way the world works, is nonetheless often used to paint an apocalyptic view of the future. We now live in a world where talking computers and self-driving cars are no longer a thing of the future – but are we also at risk of developing computers so smart that they can replace humans? Influential tech figures such as Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking have cautioned the industry against diving head-on into AI – because the technology's implementation could do more harm than good if we aren't careful. While there's no arguing that some of the cautionary tales around AI hold merit, our current reality is far from the robot-run society we've seen in the movies.

Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer. If Amazon's Alexa was the finished product, I'd write it off. I couldn't honestly recommend a virtual assistant that can't even tell me how much protein is in two eggs.

LG and Samsung have really taken advantage of the calm before the CES storm by teasing out their product announcements, one by one. LG's certainly ahead in terms of sheer strangeness here, having already announced a floating speaker and a wearable speaker collar. The Seoul-based electronics giant will also apparently be showing off a bunch of robots at the show. It's not the company's first robotic rodeo, of course, having already released some robotic vacuum cleaners and, at the very least, shown off some…interesting takes on the space, including the Rolling Bot that debuted at MWC last year (below). A trio of "non-cleaning" robots teased by the company, include what sounds like a lawn mowing model, a commercial model designed to offer up travel info to humans at airports and hotels and the Hub Robot – which, from the sound of things, is a bit like a mobile Amazon Echo.

Smart devices like the Amazon Echo record snippets of conversation when they're being used. NPR's Scott Simon asks Scott Stein of CNET to explain what happens to the data that is collected.

A Tokyo-based personal insurance company announced it will replace 34 workers in its claims department with an artificial intelligence system based on IBM's infamous Watson. The system "will be tasked with reading medical certificates written by doctors and other documents to collect information necessary for making payouts, such as medical histories, length of hospital stays, and surgical procedure names," according to an English version of an article in the Japanese daily The Mainichi. "Artificial intelligence" is a slippery term that can mean everything from personal assistants like Siri, to the natural language processing done by Google, to systems modeled on the human brain that can teach themselves new skills by processing large amounts of data. In this case, the tasks that will be done by the Watson-esque system that is replacing workers at Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance Co. don't sound much different from a typical computer program: scan for keywords, find values, check lookup tables, input all that information into an algorithm, spit out a recommendation. The final decision will be made by a human employee.